For Fedora 18 this is mainly meant as a preview. The package can be installed along yum so user's workflow is not disturbed when DNF malfunctions.

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For Fedora 18 this is mainly meant as a preview. The package can be installed along yum so user's workflow is not disturbed when DNF malfunctions. The users will be advised against using DNF on critical production machines.

The effort on DNF happens in parallel to the [[Features/Hawkey|Hawkey development]], a library providing simplified libsolv C and Python bindings.

The effort on DNF happens in parallel to the [[Features/Hawkey|Hawkey development]], a library providing simplified libsolv C and Python bindings.

Owner

Current status

Detailed Description

DNF is a fork of Yum 3.4 that uses libsolv for a backed. The main goals of the project are:

using a SAT solver for dependency resolving

allowing us to eventually use the same solver in rpm too

strict API definition for plugins

strict API definition for extending projects (Anaconda)

leaner codebase than Yum, allowing for easier maintenance

better performance and memory footprint.

For Fedora 18 this is mainly meant as a preview. The package can be installed along yum so user's workflow is not disturbed when DNF malfunctions. The users will be advised against using DNF on critical production machines.

The effort on DNF happens in parallel to the Hawkey development, a library providing simplified libsolv C and Python bindings.

Why not zif/zypp?

People are asking why we didn't choose to adopt zif (or SUSE's zypp) instead of fixing yum. The reasons are:

dnf looks for a middle ground between a sane API and some backwards compatibility.

dnf and hawkey are first steps toward using the same resolver accross the entire stack.

Libsolv is a well tested and proven code base, currently the most sophisticated and optimized dependency solving implementation.

Benefit to Fedora

Scope

How To Test

Manual testing is done by performing actions one would normally do through yum, e.g. 'dnf install virt-manager'.

User Experience

To test-drive dnf use 'dnf <command>' instead of 'yum <command>'. list/update/install/erase are currently all supported.

Dependencies

This feature will not disturb any existing Fedora software.

In the future if DNF gets accepted as the main package manager of the platform, yum plugins will have to be updated for the new API and so will Anaconda. I am prepared to assist in this effort with documentation and patches.